It is a pleasure and an honor to come before the United States Commission on Civil Rights to discuss the sensitive and difficult topic of environmental justice. I have been asked to keep these remarks brief and I will.

The essence of my perspective is that environmental justice has succeeded remarkably well as a rhetorical platform but unavoidably faired much less well as a practical policy orientation. There are a number of reasons for this and I will highlight what I take to be the most significant among them.

However, let me first observe that environmental justice activists have, beyond all doubt, accomplished two extremely impressive things.

First, they have effectively injected equity concerns deeply into our national environmental policy discourse. They have clearly triumphed at what political scientists call "agenda setting," dictating that some set of concerns will receive active attention by politicians, academics, government agencies and the media. Mobilized neighborhoods and their representatives now have the ear of public health and environmental officials. Studies are being conducted, reports written, task forces convened, and so on. None of this (including this briefing) would have happened without the environmental justice movement.

Second, environmental justice activism has scored clear victories in forcing the delay, reconsideration, and sometimes the complete abandonment of proposed facilities. At the very least, siting sponsors find that the old ways of doing business are no longer viable because challenging questions are being posed by participants who were not at the table when our landmark environmental laws were being crafted a generation ago.

The Environmental Protection Agency has said, both during the previous administration and in the current one, that the term "environmental justice" means two things: fairness and inclusion. That was Administrator Carol Browner's formulation and the environmental justice memorandum signed by Administrator Whitman on August 9 appears to appropriate it intact.

Let us put aside, for the moment, the difficult problem of what "fairness" and "inclusiveness" require in a practical sense. I would suggest both to the Commission and to the EPA that environmental justice policymaking ought to require yet a third thing: honesty. As we strive for participatory and accessible processes, and just decisions, there are some things to keep firmly in mind.

First, the term "environmental justice" continues to elude precise definition, which is not surprising given that the purpose for which it was devised was political and not analytic. The rubric binds a diverse grassroots movement together, effectively commands attention from the Establishment, and announces to the general public that what is sought is also deserved. Most of what are regarded as local environmental justice issues are, in fact, simply "not-in-my-backyard" (NIMBY) disputes in which some version of racial or ethnic politics has arisen.

Second, the largest grievances being raised under the environmental justice rubric cannot effectively be addressed by any realistic regime of environmental policy. If one wants to preserve and enhance health in low-income and minority communities (and if by "health" one means a reduction in disease, disability and premature death) then environmental justice is an exceedingly weak vehicle (for reasons I can elaborate on if you like). The EPA and public health authorities ought to be hammering home that essential point far more aggressively than they have so far.

I would make a similar observation regarding the economic aspirations that underlie environmental justice. People with lots of money generally enjoy more choices, and louder political voices, than poor people. We should try harder than we do to address the most egregious imbalances and risks that result. But we are not going to abolish the market economy or private property. We can neither banish all pollution nor equalize its incidence. We will, moreover, continue to have limited resources with which to confront our vast menu of environmental problems. These essential facts of environmental life imply that unequal proximity to pollution will endure, and that we must choose carefully where and when to intervene. This, in turn, means that we must have some scheme of environmental justice priorities. And these must come from policymakers, not the advocacy community, because the environmental justice movement (like most diverse coalitions) is resolutely unable to generate them.

In the end, I think environmental enforcement can yield real benefits for low-income communities and communities of color. I believe it can do this by addressing collective quality of life challenges, guarding not so much against cancer and hypothetical "endocrine disrupters" but, instead, reducing more prosaic and tangible threats. These include: filth (and the risk of infectious disease that come with it), odors, dust, noise, congestion, the absence of recreational and park facilities. On the health front I would identify three reasonable (though by no means easily addressed) environmental priorities for communities of color: asthma, childhood lead exposure, and the continuing threat of acute chemical poisoning faced regularly by some of our nation's poorest citizens, the largely Latino farmworker population. Communities of color confront many additional disparities in health status. But the leverage over them offered by environmental policy alone, even when aggressively sensitized to considerations of environmental justice, is minimal or nonexistent. Or so it appears to me.

Thank you for this opportunity to share my thoughts with the Commission today.

      

 

 

Racial and ethnic disparities are pervasive, and especially distressing in the case of African Americans. On a host of indicators (health, wealth, test scores, college attendance, civic participation, and Internet access, to name a few) African Americans regularly come up short. While nearly everyone acknowledges vast improvement, especially for the middle class, stubborn gaps and barriers remain, all the more frustrating given today's turbocharged economy, the near-disappearance of legal discrimination, and continuing effort by a large network of activists and professionals within and beyond government. But remaining disparities are likely reducible only through an uncertain blend of educational and economic advancement and a thoughtful political strategy. Above all, it will take time.

One must expect some disparities since precise equality of social outcomes remains a chimera. The raw material necessary to thrive in a heavily information-based economy that rewards entrepreneurship, advanced training, and access to capital and supportive social networks cannot be equally distributed, even among Euro-American groups. And since African Americans are overrepresented among the low-income segment of the population, we should naturally perceive a racially tinged inequality.

Chatter: Necessary But Insufficient

Before any problem is successfully addressed it must be recognized and deemed worth confronting. One might think that initiating and sustaining a public discourse on racial disparities would be the easy part but it is actually a formidable challenge. The most obvious aspect is the sheer number of disparities between whites and nonwhites that one can plausibly highlight. As implied above, the list of problems can paralyze by its very length.

Moreover, even facing up to (much less attacking) some problems can prompt discomfort. Daniel Patrick Moynihan learned this in the mid-1960s when he raised the issue of black family structure. And many have probably forgotten how much harder it was a generation ago to engage in an honest discussion of such matters as teen pregnancy or the gap in cognitive skills between black and white children. More recently, black churches have shied away from confronting the horrific toll that the HIV-AIDS epidemic has been taking on black America since the 1980s. Even though most new infections and a large majority of pediatric AIDS cases crop up among African Americans (with AIDS remaining the leading cause of death among black 25- to 44- year-olds of both sexes), squeamishness about its modes of transmission has always impeded discussion. The Washington Blade, a gay weekly newspaper in the nation's capital, observed recently that "new infections among black gay and bisexual men are largely responsible for driving the AIDS epidemic" among African Americans. That stark fact has, at least until recently, chilled involvement by the clergy.

The Conundrum of Health

But getting everyone talking is just the beginning. Leadership requires followers, and for many social problems an elite-driven discourse, no matter how intense, is of little use unless it connects effectively with the capacities and incentives facing ordinary people. That, surely, is the core challenge posed by the spotlight that journalists, foundations, and policymakers now regularly shine on disparities in health status between minority populations and other Americans. In a February 1998 radio address President Clinton declared that "no matter what the reason, racial and ethnic disparities in health are unacceptable in a country that values equality and equal opportunity for all." Although eschewing a rhetorical flourish that would instantly have recalled failed efforts against poverty and cancer, Clinton nevertheless can be said to have launched a "war" (undeclared and low-key, to be sure) on a handful of health disparities identified by the Department of Health and Human Services pursuant to the presidential initiative on race.

But reducing such conditions as HIV infection, infant mortality, hypertension, and diabetes among African Americans to the rates at which whites are afflicted will require more than presidential attention and government funding. Perhaps millions of persons must be regularly monitored and sustain at least modest changes in habit and lifestyle, with some adhering zealously to daily drug regimens. These changes must occur among people facing associated and sometimes culturally sanctioned conditions (such as tobacco addiction, excess weight, unwholesome diets, and inadequate health care access) to which they are long habituated. Lives that are disorganized, stressful, or sedentary may resist even determined intervention. A recent case, recounted in the Washington Post, of Ohio Medicaid recipients who continued using hospital emergency rooms despite being provided a health maintenance option is suggestive. Moreover, recent evidence indicates that some physicians may treat their black patients differently from their white ones. Such provider behavior, if genuinely pervasive, may resist change as well.

Moreover, neither a guaranteed right of access nor individual compliance speaks to a fundamental underlying challenge. Universal health care coverage remains a worthy social goal, but its achievement may not augur success on the disparity front. Both Britain and Canada show signs of continuing disparities in access and outcomes linked to socioeconomic status. "Wealthier is healthier" is perhaps the single most widely replicated finding in the health field.

The Paradox of Prevention

One recurring systemic difficulty is that recognizing an equity problem and mobilizing to address it tend to lag behind the creation of the processes and policies where the problem arises. Sometimes a consciously inequitable policy choice has prevailed, as when the Congress that created the Social Security program in 1935 declined to authorize benefits for farm and domestic workers, an action with greatly disproportionate adverse consequences for African Americans. When the landmark environmental legislation of the 1970s was enacted, concerns regarding what is now called "environmental justice" had occurred to few community advocates or policymakers; effective advocacy began penetrating the federal government only in the 1990s. Even more recently, the introduction of personal computers and the subsequent Internet explosion have been a great boon to society as a whole. But the implications of a "digital divide" separating minority and low-income persons from the rest of American society would have seemed too ephemeral and distant a decade ago, even though the disparity we see today was entirely predictable. How could one have planned to address it? Perhaps more important, who would have paid any attention to anyone trying to? But by last year the issue was making headlines as the target of yet another federal initiative. The paradox is that one wants ideally to prevent problems that become apparent, and tangible enough to appear worth solving, only after time has allowed them to take root sufficiently to generate concern.

Technology and Its Uses

Technology, a primary engine of economic growth and employment, is a sure vehicle for both opportunity and disparity, increasingly so in the new millennium. Every product has both a price (that may place it beyond the means of some consumers) and a profile of skills and values necessary to its effective use. Hence there must always arise disparity in benefits from technology. As with television, the telephone, and other developments, declining prices and increased ease of use should have a democratizing impact. But that effect will not be completely egalitarian, no matter how cheap or simple the product, because people (and groups) differ in skills and preferences. Cable television is accessible to nearly everyone but it's also a safe bet that the History Channel's audience is demographically skewed. Someone with shaky reading skills is likely less comfortable with e-mail and web browsing than another person more verbally adept. And when the Census Bureau queried Internet "non-users" in 1998 regarding their reasons for abstaining, about a quarter of white and black respondents alike replied that they simply "don't want it." The share of white non-users citing cost concerns was 15.6 percent while the figure for African Americans was 22 percent. This gap will probably narrow as prices decline, but it is worth remembering that even today 6 percent of American households overall (and 15 percent of African-American households) do not have telephone service.

Transracial Appeals and Nonracial Policies

If race remains America's major piece of unfinished business, African Americans must chart new pathways toward its completion on favorable terms. During only two brief periods of American history (the years 1850?70 and the decade leading up to passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965) have black interests commanded a compelling moral leverage over the national discourse. Such eras will not likely recur, even in a political environment of governmental budget surpluses.

Three strategic principles follow from these circumstances. First, the African-American community must become ever more engaged by, and anchored within, the private sector. There lies wealth, from which flows both an enlarged collective voice and expanded personal choice. Second, in the political realm, as many have already observed, the African-American community must frame issues of importance to it in terms that facilitate building transracial coalitions. In part that means advocating multi-interest policies that have potentially disproportionate payoffs for blacks. An example would be enhanced efforts to educate and train America's incarcerated population; that's one of several obvious places to target the "digital divide." A third and related need is an African-American leadership that identifies and analyzes the racial implications of nonracial policies, from free trade to consumer protection to suburban sprawl and beyond. It is imperative that we know whether efforts to control sprawl will expand or constrict housing and employment prospects among urban blacks. In short, both realism and farsightedness must characterize the continuing struggle for African-American uplift.

      

 

 

Abstract

Allegations that disproportionate environmental risks fall on low-income and minority communities promote calls for "environmental justice." A related claim suggests that higher rates of some diseases stem from unequal risks. The empirical evidence supporting these claims remains weak, but uncertainty and controversy are unlikely to abate in the near future. The environmental justice movement has successfully mobilized its constituents, and captured the attention of policymakers, with a politically potent rhetoric of "risk and racism." Ironically, the movement remains largely uninterested in, or even hostile to, formal risk assessment even while ostensibly calling for more of it.

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Introduction by Michael H. Armacost, President, The Brookings Institution
Keynote Address by The Honorable Eleanor Holmes Norton, Congresswoman, District of Columbia
Panel I: Learning From Solutions at the Grassroots
Panel II: Race in America: An Overview
Closing Remarks by Robert B. Johnson, Assistant to the President and Director of the President's Initiative for One America, The White House

Examine other Brookings research on Race and Minority Politics.

      

 

 

The 1994 elections of the first Republican Congress since the early Eisenhower years guaranteed a dramatic change in the political environment for regulation. No longer would the crafty auto-industry defender John Dingell (D-MI) chair the House Committee on Energy and Commerce (since renamed the committee on commerce). No longer would Dingell rule the oversight staff empire that made him the most feared regulatory micromanager in congressional history. Nor would Dingell's long-time adversary in clean air debates, environmental champion Henry Waxman (D-CA), hold the gavel at the Subcommittee on Health and the Environment. The election meant that these posts would pass to Republicans, two changes that, by themselves, augured a new day in regulatory politics.

Of course, the same thing would happen throughout Congress, assuring that federal regulators faced both a new set of overseers and a very different oversight message. Moreover, our Constitution allows Congress to pass any law it wants, provided that enough members want it and that not more than four Supreme Court justices object. On the other hand, a president, acting alone, can pass little more than his dinnertime mashed potatoes, and the 1994 elections clearly put President Clinton on the defensive politically. Thus some might have thought the situation conducive to far-reaching and fundamental statutory change in the pursuit of economic efficiency and scientific rationality.

But the legislative regulatory reform record of the past three years is decidedly mixed. Reform advocates have both won significant victories and encountered some predictable resistance. They have also made some avoidable mistakes. A look at where and how change has occurred thus far, and at where it has been stymied, should inform strategic thinking as the reform debate enters yet another congressional election, one overwhelmingly likely (if history is any guide) to leave Republicans in the driver s seat for at least two more years.

Political Parameters

Above all, it is important to keep in mind what the 1994 and 1996 elections did not change. They did not reduce in any way the basic political appeal (even sanctity) of the public health and safety or of the environment---all of which lie at the focus of our most consistently contentious national regulatory efforts. For many years opinion surveys have found a durable base of support for safe products, clean water, and the like. This will not change.

Citizens (and especially economic constituencies that may be adversely affected by regulation, such as coal miners) do predictably balk at possible job losses. They also chafe at personally intrusive or tangibly burdensome regulatory decisions and programs (and at costly deregulatory policies, such as allowing cable television rates to climb). Pollution-reducing restrictions on personal automobile use would simply go too far for most Americans. Expensive or invasive vehicle inspection and maintenance regimes can evoke outcry even among liberal Democrats. Recall that in the mid-1970s Congress quickly disconnected the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's automobile ignition interlock requirement (which prevented the start-up of a car until the seat belt had been buckled) and rebuffed a Food and Drug Administration proposal to ban saccharin as a possible human carcinogen. In both instances consumers were outraged and Congress responded. But none of this meant that citizens wanted to abolish either HTSA or FDA. They simply wanted "common sense" restored to regulation.

Nor did the 1994 and 1996 elections change the occupant of the White House, a Democratic president with his own set of incentives and cards to play in the game of regulatory politics. As things now stand, unless congressional Republicans pass regulatory bills that President Clinton finds tolerable, or approve controversial proposals by veto-proof margins, statutory reform of regulation simply cannot proceed. Moreover, as Republicans now know all too well, by publicly deriding their legislative initiatives as dangerous to Americans (and especially to their kids) President Clinton can quickly seize the high ground and leave his opponents gasping for political air.

Certain scenarios are simply implausible. Barring discovery of some new political alchemy, it is inconceivable for Clinton to endorse a revision of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (a statute that has stood virtually untouched since President Nixon signed it in 1970) if AFL-CIO president John Sweeney strongly opposes the bill. Clinton may be willing to antagonize organized labor on trade issues, but Al Gore can't afford to go into the next presidential election campaign having broken his February 1996 promise to the AFL-CIO executive council to keep workplace protections intact. And no major FDA reform will get very far in the current White House if the FDA commissioner (especially one as widely respected as former commissioner David Kessler) complains that it places consumers at unreasonable risk or unduly ties FDA's hands. Alternatively, funneling more resources to FDA to speed reviews of new drugs (as was done five years ago with the newly reauthorized Prescription Drug User Fee Act) is the kind of reform that both consumer-conscious liberals and enterprise-minded conservatives can embrace. Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Edward Kennedy (D-MA) jointly pushed for the legislation last time around.

Finally, as Pietro Nivola observes elsewhere in this issue, it is important to recognize a fundamental bipartisan appeal of policy making via regulation: it gives politicians something to sell to voters for which relatively few government (and therefore tax) dollars need be found. Direct regulatory burdens are typically borne by regulated firms, not taxpayers. As economists regularly observe, cumulative social costs can be significant (and may be questionable from the perspective of cost-benefit analysis), but they have the virtue of not turning up in the federal budget or directly increasing the deficit. Environmental programs (most notably clean air compliance and hazardous waste cleanup) result in billions of dollars in private-sector and transaction costs yearly. By comparison, the direct costs of EPA s clean air and hazardous waste programs pale into insignificance.

Curbing Costs, Crafting Procedures

Anxious to tame the federal government and make good on their Contract with America, congressional Republicans scored a lightening-quick victory for cost-conscious regulation with the 1995 Unfunded Mandates Reform Act. As far back as the 1970s New York City's Democratic Mayor Ed Koch was regularly complaining about an onerous federal "mandate millstone" weighing on state and local governments. The new law required that estimates be made of the costs imposed on state, local, and tribal governments by major new federal initiatives, whether statutory (if greater than $50 million) or administrative (if exceeding $100 million). The law requires agencies to select "the least costly, most cost-effective, or least burdensome alternative" course for achieving their objectives.

A determined Congress signaled its desire for cost-conscious regulation through the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act and the regulatory accountability provision in the Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Act of 1996. Of the two, only the former seems to have any real bite. It makes available new channels for small business to advocate its views before EPA and OSHA regulations are issued. It mandates congressional review of major regulations before they become effective, and it allows time for consideration of a joint resolution of disapproval (which requires a presidential signature). Of course, agencies are ever-sensitive to their political environments, and it will be a rare agency head who dares to risk a joint rebuke from both Congress and the president who appointed him or her. A safe bet is that this is most likely in the presumably rare instance when (as with FDA's abortive saccharin ban 20 years ago) the agency concludes that the statutory instructions under which it operates - instructions crafted by a prior Congress - leave no choice but to offend current sentiments on the issue at hand.

As in earlier debates, a focus on generic regulatory review procedures has proved one politically feasible path to legislative consensus. Both congressional parties find legislative veto provisions (requiring the presentation of some general class of administrative actions to Congress before they take effect) appealing. Such provisions speak to a bipartisan concern with institutional power but do not single out or immediately threaten substantive regulatory programs (and their attentive constituencies). Old hands with long memories will recall a 94-0 Senate vote in March 1982 for similar legislation, which later died in the House.

The (Partial) Death of Delaney

But to get serious about legislative reform of regulation mostly requires getting a lot more specific. Particular substantive programs, and the statutes that authorize them, beckon. And it is here that both parties, at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, pulled off one of the more interesting, and instructive, legislative surprises in recent memory: the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996. This law abolished the long-derided, but long untouchable, Delaney clause in the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act as it applied to federal policy for agricultural pesticide residues in processed foods.

New York Congressman James Delaney inserted his famous clause into food and drug regulatory law some 40 years ago in response to rising public concern about cancer. The provision established a "zero tolerance, zero risk" framework for both food additives and pesticide residues: no detectable amount of either was permissible if it were found, through human or animal testing, to cause cancer. But over time, ever-more sensitive tests were able to identify substances at previously undetectable levels. As we went from measuring "parts per million" to "parts per trillion," and some scientists began openly questioning the rationale for an obsessive focus on trace amounts of artificial chemicals in foods, the Delaney framework appeared increasingly less realistic.

But simply rescinding the Delaney clause was politically unthinkable. As a House staffer once pointedly said to me, no legislator wanted to see the New York Times story in which voters were told that their representative has just increased their likelihood of developing cancer.

In the summer of 1996, with little warning and after intense but quiet negotiations on Capitol Hill, the political logjam suddenly broke. The new law specifies safety as meaning "a reasonable certainty that no harm will result from aggregate exposure." Observers cite several factors in the sudden turnaround: court decisions that threatened to force some pesticides off the market; Republican hunger for an environmental achievement; business desires for a consistent regulatory regime in which to operate; environmentalist (and EPA) interest in moving beyond a focus on cancer and processed foods; and simple exhaustion, and desire for a deal, among all parties concerned.

The central political secret of the new law is simply that it offers key benefits for business along with new elements that arguably strengthen consumer health protections. The new law embraces both raw and processed foods for the first time; rigidly restricts the circumstances under which social benefits may be considered when setting residue tolerance levels; and provides for expanded re-registration of existing pesticides. The industry complaint that a scientifically insupportable Delaney regime remains applicable to food additives and other substances will almost certainly have to be met with similar political creativity, allowing business and health advocates to emerge victorious.

Crisis Response: Dèjà Vu All Over Again

Changed health and safety regulatory statutes also continue to be especially likely in the same circumstances that have made them possible historically: the political need, and political opportunity, presented by a new or newly salient threat to the public health. Deregulators and regulatory reformers of all sorts have little choice but to respond to unforeseeable events on a case-by-case basis. From its beginnings in 1906 the history of FDA has largely been defined by a continuing series of crisis-inspired statutes. The deaths of some 100 people who had ingested a contaminated elixir propelled a major 1938 revision of the law, and Europe s thalidomide tragedy helped create a congressional climate favorable to passage of the 1962 drug amendments requiring, for the first time, that drugs be evaluated for efficacy as well as safety. Since then, defective intrauterine devices, painkillers, and infant formula have all given rise to new statutory authority for FDA, much as the crisis at Love Canal turned EPA into the custodian of a much-maligned Superfund hazardous waste cleanup program.

Today bacteria-tainted hamburger has revived calls for FDA and the Agriculture Department (responsible for meat and poultry safety) to have the authority to compel product recalls instead of pleading (in and out of court) for them. Food industry lobbies continue to resist giving FDA and USDA this power, believing it unnecessary. Advocates observe, by comparison, that NHTSA can order automobile recalls. But consider the differences in stakes, in political culture, and in consumer sensitivity. A handful of vertically integrated firms can far more easily respond to a recall order, and absorb its costs, than a small cannery or slaughterhouse, which may reasonably fear being put out of business. Farmers and cattlemen are also likely to harbor strong suspicions of Washington. And consumers, on average, are probably more nervous about any defect in the foods they eat than in the cars they drive. Lawmaking will have to take account of such factors to be successful. One beneficial effect of recent food safety scares, and of the resulting desperate search for solutions, has been FDA approval of an apparently reliable but long-neglected (some would say suppressed) technological option: the irradiation of foods to kill disease-causing microbes.

No Monkey Wrenching Allowed

If Republicans committed any single strategic blunder after their congressional takeover, it was allowing their opponents plausibly to accuse them of trying to kill the regulatory patient they said they wanted to save. The congressional leadership tried to embrace a "silver bullet" approach to reform, amending all regulatory statutes simultaneously in a single statute mandating generic procedural and analytic requirements. This would spare Republicans the need to fight a multi-front war of attrition on every separate statutory authorization. As noted above, they got some of what they wanted. But this strategy, and the tone of the debate that ensued, also allowed critics to portray what they were up to as insidious deregulation on-the-sly, what Jessica Mathews, writing in the Washington Post, later dismissed as a "sand-in-the-crankcase" approach to regulatory reform. A group of experts affiliated with the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, and Resources for the Future recently recommended that Congress "rewrite key regulatory statutes" to encourage more flexible, cost-conscious regulation and a greater role for the states in managing "problems that can be better handled there" (see box). The debate should be thoughtful and honest. It will no doubt be contentious, and demagogic rhetoric on both sides is always a possibility. And to win, the Republican congressional majority must persuade instead of evade.

      

 

 

Event Information

The panel will discuss Tamar Jacoby's new book Someone Else's House: America's Unfinished Struggle for Integration. The book dissects race relations in America through the prism of three cities: New York, Atlanta, and Detroit.

      

 

 

Environmental Policy is always contentious, largely because environmental laws and rules inevitably create economic winners and losers. (Greve and Smith 1992). But important noneconomic values clash as well. "Partnership"—a label that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) applies to its relations with almost any entity it is not suing—is but one of many magnets for ambiguity and contention. Which partner (EPA, a state agency, or a local government) should take the lead in raising or deciding a given question? Every answer likely attracts a different supporting coalition. The former champion of equitable treatment (defined as treating like cases alike), faced by different and prospectively more painful circumstances, will tend suddenly to see the virtue of responsiveness and "flexibility" (Wilson 1989, 326). The environment/development trade-off has been so fundamental a problem for so long that a furious search for "win-win" approaches and "green gold" is now a regular motif in environmental Policy discourse (Gore 1993; Moore and Miller 1994). But if that trade-off has prompted considerable creativity, another political and intellectual puzzle looms as far more challenging: the tension between rationalizing and democratizing strains in environmental policy reform (Foreman, 1998).

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Honest and thoughtful citizens of all racial backgrounds can agree about two things. First, on the whole, working and middle-class African Americans are vastly better off than we were 40 or more years ago. Jim Crow is long deceased, and most black citizens enjoy both mundane social access and genuine opportunity to an extent that would have seemed absurd fantasy in the 1950s.

Second, despite dramatic positive change, all is not yet well, either within black America or in black-white relations. The bottom-most rungs of the African-American community endure a depressingly familiar litany of problems, including crime, joblessness, disease, inadequate housing, inferior education and social isolation.

The Clinton administration's traveling talkfest, the much-ballyhooed "race initiative," is likely doomed to achieve little in this regard. What we most lack is not President Bill Clinton's desired "racial dialogue" (satisfying though it can be) but two far more elusive prizes: policy-relevant knowledge and a political consensus for dramatic action.

In important ways, we are uncertain how to uplift African Americans left behind by the civil rights movement and affirmative action. To take one recent example, a study of the federal Job Training and Partnership Act shows that despite years of effort, experts have not found a way to increase employment prospects among high school dropouts.

Also eluding us is the sheer political will to support ambitious policy initiatives. Even with a receding federal deficit, neither Congress nor the public is inclined toward new check-writing targeted at the poor.

It's hard to see how franker interracial talk will spur much improvement. If anyone can lead a national seminar on race, our endlessly empathetic president from Little Rock should be that person. But even he knows that presidents are most likely to spark successful discussion when there is a precise goal at stake, such as passage of a civil rights act.

The best possible outcome of the White House-sponsored "conversation on race" would be further exploration of (and maybe even some agreement about) the contentious questions of affirmative action and multiculturalism. This might assist middle-class African Americans like myself (i.e. an affirmative-action beneficiary who matriculates at a prestigious campus where identity politics is all the rage).

But such a result offers little to low-income African-American citizens who are mired in disorganization and despair. It is their interests, not mine, that most desperately require the president's limited attention and the nation's conversational energy.

How do we propel sustained discussion along these lines? We can start by recognizing why it isn't happening. The poor are isolated, anonymous and widely perceived as undeserving. Many of us don't see why we should care.

This implies two complementary principles. First, we must work harder to put a living and sympathetic human face on poverty. The urban poor are citizens, not statistics. Second, we must heighten awareness of the likely (and possibly frightful) shared costs of further neglect.

As in everyday discussion among friends, a blend of sympathy and collective interest offers a promising basis for helpful conversation.

      

 

 

Ensuring that authorities effectively address any disproportionate risks borne by low-income and minority communities has been a central theme of advocates for "environmental justice." Since the early 1980s the environmental justice movement, a diverse coalition of grassroots activist organizations and their allies, has charged that communities of color have too often been the "invisible man" of environmentalism—underrepresented in environmental organizations and policy processes. The result, say activists, is that communities of color have been unfairly victimized by polluted sites and inadequate environmental law enforcement. The most strident rhetoric goes even further, asserting that such communities have been routinely targeted for environmental poisons, leading to higher rates of chronic illness, including cancer. "Environmental racism" is the incendiary label often applied to such claims (Risk Policy Report, Oct. 17, 1997, p. 13.)

But when you clear away all the smoke blown over risk and racism in recent years, there turns out to be remarkably little good evidence demonstrating that low-income and minority citizens regularly bear a disproportionate share of society's environmental risk, much less that they develop pollution-related illnesses more often than other citizens. Perhaps more interestingly, a close examination of environmental justice activism makes abundantly clear that, despite persistent rhetoric to the contrary, the movement is actually not terribly risk-driven after all. And anyone hoping for the day when EPA and state environmental authorities have a reliable analytic handle on disproportionate risk borne by environmental justice constituencies should receive fair warning: don't hold your breath.

To be sure, we are more likely to find certain environmental risks in closer proximity to poor people than to wealthier ones. An EPA task force on environmental equity, created in July 1990 by administrator William Reilly in the wake of activist prodding, determined that one problem—lead exposure—stood out in the data as a particular threat among low-income black youngsters. There probably are other industrial substances having a greater cumulative adverse impact on minorities than on whites—toxic residue ingested via low-income and subsistence fisheries is often mentioned—but any resulting disproportionate disease incidence has thus far eluded science.

The lens of environmental justice can blind one to the big picture. Lots of low-income and minority folks live and work in cities. Anyone who does is almost certainly breathing dirtier air than anyone who doesn't. And no one disputes that a fair amount of what migrates into urban airsheds would ideally not be there, especially the ozone that, as a significant respiratory irritant, EPA aims to reduce further. Ozone can help trigger asthma attacks, and African Americans suffer disproportionately from asthma. But these observations hardly add up to a compelling rationale for racialized clean air politics and policies.

By the same token, New Jersey is renowned for having more hazardous waste than any other state. Would anyone claim that the size of that state's minority population in any way explains this? One might pose the same question about the notorious Hanford nuclear waste site in Washington state, or even the infamous (and vastly overblown) Love Canal and Times Beach episodes of years ago. Recent and careful studies do not bear out the claim of regular or systematic ethnic bias either in facility siting or in cleanup decision making. Though activists have a hard time accepting it, racism simply doesn't appear to be a significant factor in our national environmental decision making.

Anyone who has closely watched the environmental justice movement over the years has heard two phrases repeated with an almost mantra-like regularity. One is "cancer alley." The other is "multiple, cumulative and synergistic risk." In movement lore, "Cancer Alley" endures as perhaps the clearest example of environmental harm disproportionately borne by communities of color. Trouble is, careful research refutes the allegation. On the other hand, the cry of "multiple, cumulative and synergistic risk" bundles a partly disingenuous plea for more research along with an intuitively appealing presumption that minority and low-income communities face substantial environmental risks that remain unrecognized and unassessed. But the plea is disingenuous because activists have no intention whatsoever of using risk assessment, however careful, to guide their advocacy priorities.

"Cancer Alley" refers to the roughly 85-mile industrial corridor stretching from Baton Rouge, Louisiana to New Orleans, said to be home to a quarter of the nation's petrochemical production. Some residents have been convinced for years that living in the area carries with it significant additional cancer risk. In 1993 testimony before a House Judiciary subcommittee Pat Bryant, representative of the Gulf Coast Tenants Association, proclaimed:

"'Cancer Alley' . . .remains one of the most poisoned areas anyplace. One hundred and thirty-eight petro-chemical facilities have made home in large plantations, most of the time as close as possible to African-American communities. .

"Despite denials of the petro-chemical industry financed studies, we know that cancer incidence in this corridor is higher than the national average. Cancer is so commonplace in ?Cancer Alley' that almost every family is touched.

" . . .This area has become a zone of national sacrifice. This is genocide at its finest, and it is a national disgrace."

Actually it is not surprising that black Louisianans have been seeing a lot of cancer since everyone else is too. American Enterprise Institute resident fellow Michael Fumento observes that "one fourth of us will contract cancer and one fifth of us will die of it. Indeed, as the population ages and fewer and fewer people die of other causes, more and more will die of cancer."

But have black Louisianans been seeing more cancer than other Americans? In 1990 the respective cancer incidence rates among blacks and whites nationally stood at 423 and 393 per 100,000. Differences in behavior and health care access are clearly part of the explanation. In the 1970s some studies suggested an association between lung cancer incidence and the percentage of a population employed in or near certain industries or in urban areas. But these studies often failed to take smoking into account, and the association has not withstood scrutiny in the Louisiana case. The current scientific consensus is that behavioral (and some occupational) factors have been associated with cancer incidence in Louisiana but that there is no overall "cancer epidemic" in that state or in the so-called "Cancer Alley." Indeed, blacks in south Louisiana appeared to have fewer cases of cancer than the national average during the 1983-87 period covered by the most careful study yet, published in the April 1996 issue of the Journal of the Louisiana State Medical Society. Although cancer incidence among blacks may have been low, mortality rates were indeed excessive when compared with the nation as a whole, perhaps indicating that poor health care was a factor in the cancer burden among area residents.

But the mythical "Cancer Alley" endures in movement rhetoric, and it is not hard to understand why. A connection between petrochemical plants—or, for that matter, between any source of fearsome, unwanted "goop"—and disease has powerful intuitive appeal for citizens even though science may identify no causal linkage. As Howard Margolis of the University of Chicago argues in Dealing with Risk, a divergence between expert and citizen perception of risk remains one of the more treacherous fault lines in environmental politics, precisely because of the profound grip that intuition wields over citizen perceptions. And since one cannot prove a negative—that is, prove beyond all doubt that factories and dumpsites could never cause cancer—uncertainty prevails.

That uncertainty also provides powerful leverage for mobilizing citizens, and for holding the Establishment's feet to the fire. In the end, this is the real game that environmental justice activists are playing. These activists (especially those more or less full-time advocates who champion a broad agenda transcending specific site-level grievances) are best perceived as social justice proponents who happen to specialize in environmental themes. Employing such themes, they try to win a larger voice, and more resources, for disadvantaged communities, broadly defined. Their specific targets are many and varied, their overarching motivation strongly egalitarian. On behalf of their redistributive ends, they wish to arouse and unify citizens in order to make and enforce demands on business and government. The environmental justice movement is, of necessity, highly opportunistic and improvisational. Because the movement's main thrust is toward the "empowerment" of a diverse citizen constituency, scientific findings that blunt or conflict with that goal are a decided inconvenience, and are therefore either ignored or ridiculed.

Formal analysis, including risk assessment, is thus largely irrelevant to the underlying objectives and gratifications that stir activist and community enthusiasm under the environmental justice rubric. Sympathetic accounts of the movement's rise often highlight studies published in 1983 by the General Accounting Office and in 1987 by the United Church of Christ/Commission for Racial Justice. These studies (especially the latter, entitled "Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States") purported to show that commercial hazardous waste facilities were more likely to be found near minority communities.

What is most important to grasp about these studies is not just that they are crude and woefully misleading—though they are—but rather that they were always mere instruments of the movement rather than its cause. Although more refined risk analyses may have some uses in the environmental justice context, it would be naive to imagine that their conclusions will matter much to communities unless bonded to a gratifying practical politics anchored within those communities. And analytic conclusions cannot achieve this effect unless they demonstrate what activists want shown, that minority and low-income people are disproportionately victimized.

The environmental justice perspective is powerful not because it speaks honestly to technical questions of harm or risk—it often does not—but because it appears to promise something larger, more uplifting, more viscerally engaging than mere careful calculation can offer. It effectively speaks to the fear and anger among local communities feeling overwhelmed by forces beyond their control, and outraged by what they perceive to be assaults on their collective quality of life.

In this context, "multiple, cumulative and synergistic risk" represents a piece of technical rhetoric but not authentic commitment to a technical perspective. Activists have no intention of allowing toxicologists, epidemiologists and their various intellectual kin to define the premises of their movement. Indeed, like grassroots antitoxics advocacy generally, environmental justice largely reflects a challenge to technocracy, and to technical ways of thinking, not an embrace of them. Such language is believed to be the price of admission to the policy process, but it most certainly is not what the ticket buyers are really all about.

"Multiple, cumulative, and synergistic risk" is useful to the environmental justice movement in yet another way: it is virtually impossible that environmental authorities can, in the foreseeable future at least, successfully study and attack it. In December 1996 EPA staff from the Office of Policy Planning and Evaluation (OPPE) came before EPA's National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) to brief members on the cumulative exposure project under way. NEJAC learned that the project was using existing data to independently estimate cumulative concentrations/exposures from three pathways (i.e. outdoor air, drinking water, food) in an attempt to lay the groundwork for consideration of multi-pathway cumulative exposure. But that last word—exposure—bears emphasis, for it remains a long way indeed from "risk." For the moment, let us assume that one can have full faith in the data being assembled, and that the inevitable gaps and uncertainties don't too badly afflict those substances (such as dioxin, PCBs, pesticides, and lead) ranking highest in the activist pantheon of environmental horrors. Even so, can one expect EPA reliably to gauge the various interactive and cumulative effects of these (often very low) doses and exposures, and to do so in a way that would win the confidence of activists? The simple answer is no (unless, again, the results happen to provide a convenient platform for activist claims). Yet EPA's all but certain failure on this score will help activists in one potent way, by offering grounds for additional rhetorical leverage over the agency.

There are serious environmental problems afflicting low-income and minority communities. But they are overwhelmingly quality-of-life problems: odors, noise, unsightly construction or destruction, dilapidation, congestion—as well as the low incomes that often bring people into proximity with such things. Truth be told, activist carping about risk and racism is really a cover for trying to crank up collateral attention to these other issues. But at the end of the day, one should not be too hard on the activists, despite their manifest limitations. To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, they are simply doing what they can with what they have.

      

 

 

From the beginning, "civil rights" was a misleading term, perhaps an outright misnomer. The moral, legal, and rhetorical pursuit of collective rights of access was but an essential strategy in a multifront war for a much larger prize: the uplift of a people, once mostly enslaved, afterward still widely despised. "Civil rights" could never mean just individual rights, any more than NAACP denoted a National Association for the Advancement of Coherent Principles. Indeed, black leaders and organizations have always known that they must pursue the vast and varied interests of their stigmatized and marginalized constituents by any realistic mechanism available. Rights were more a means than an end. If progress appears to have stalled, it is largely because the successive strategies embraced by the champions of racial uplift have all encountered their practical and political limits. For the most part these strategies have not so much failed as fallen victim to inevitable exhaustion and diminishing returns.

Everyone now recognizes that the strategy of securing basic legal access, pursued during an era of heroic civil rights advocacy, has long since run its course. As textbooks today routinely teach, that phase of the struggle began in the courts during the 1930s, shifting trajectory toward Congress a generation later as favorable public opinion, nurtured by a disciplined plea for simple justice and bouts of segregationist violence, made such a turn politically feasible. The basic access argument was simple and therefore potent. Individuals ought not to be proscribed, purely for reasons of color, from plainly quotidian activities available to other citizens: voting for mayor, viewing a movie from a seat of one's choosing, wolfing down a cheeseburger at a dimestore lunch counter. The great majority of white Americans had no particular affection for blacks, but had never felt the need for separate water fountains. Such relatively petty outrages proved hard to defend outside the Deep South. Thankfully, it has now been a long while since even most white southerners would have insisted that, say, Harvard's distinguished Afro-Americanist Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ought not teach at a "white" university.

But the high moral perch afforded by the access agenda always had stringent limits, and they became apparent early. Formal doors to advancement might stand unlocked, perhaps even wide open, but how many black Americans would or could walk through? A Skip Gates might march off to Yale, but how many others would follow, especially if all the university did was mail out a brochure to Harlem with a road map to New Haven enclosed? Legally desegregated schools and workplaces could not, by themselves, yield diverse student bodies and workforces, much less ensure equal graduation and promotion rates.

Not surprisingly, as far back as the 1960s, the access agenda was giving way to rather less lofty (and still ongoing) haggles over dollars and numbers. Congress could target funds on numerous problems, creating new legal authorities when a favorable combination of support and indifference prevailed. A less openly democratic approach to black uplift lay in the dull machinery of administration, amidst the arcana of government regulations and guidance memoranda, subject to policing by the courts. Merely offering individualized redress for particular claimants according to each specific grievance appeared dreadfully inadequate to the scale of the social challenge--rather like restoring a beach by hauling in one grain of sand at a time. More institutionally aggressive efforts, formal and informal, seemed warranted.

Thus were born goals and timetables, minority contracting set-asides, and the entire regime of both "hard" (formal, mandated, quantitatively monitored) and "soft" (informal, voluntary, improvisational, hortatory) affirmative action. (This writer is a product of that regime. Every professional appointment and educational credential I have held would likely have been unattainable absent the--mostly informal--bestowal of crucial "breaks" tied at least implicitly to my race. For what it s worth, I have felt no attendant stigma.That's because of my own sense that most success in life is a matter of breaks exploited via work--a very American intuition.)

Advocates for black uplift heard a new and disturbing thunder in the distance as far back as the mid-1960s. Early lightning struck as a government report entitled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Crafted by then-Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the report suggested serious new tears in black America's social fabric that might widen in time. But neither a leadership anchored securely in the safe harbor of its access-- affirmative action agenda, nor the increasingly strident voices gathering under the Black Power rubric, were in any mood to hear some Irishman's embarrassing prattle about "Negro family structure," however plainly sympathetic and data-laden. America's social policy researchers have been making up for considerable lost time as a result.

This issue of the Brookings Review reflects a sense that on racial matters the American condition is overall dramatically improved, but far more complicated than it used to seem, and in important respects continually depressing. A significant black middle class has emerged (and not solely through affirmative action). White racial attitudes are astonishingly transformed from where they stood during Franklin Roosevelt's presidency, when lynching blacks was still an informally listed entree on the menu of southern civic entertainments.

Yet some devilishly tenacious ills remain, for which neither access nor affirmative action is satisfactory medicine: low skills and abysmal test scores among minority youngsters; opportunity-sapping teenage pregnancies; the vastly disproportionate involvement of black males with the criminal justice system; the lure of drug money and addiction among the black underclass. A foray into the Brookings library recently yielded a new issue of the Journal of Human Resources, in which Howard S. Bloom and several collaborators assess the Job Training and Partnership Act's income effects for adults and out-of-school youths. Since I had not seen the results of the National JTPA Study trumpeted across the front page of the Washington Post, I should have known what was coming. Still, I winced at what I read (emphasis below added):

Findings from the National JTPA Study parallel those from the few other studies of employment and training programs that have employed experimental designs. The modest positive impacts on earnings experienced by adult women...are consistent with the impacts observed by previous randomized studies of work-welfare programs.... The modest positive impacts experienced by adult men....are consistent with the impacts observed for men by the several existing randomized studies of programs for displaced workers....

For out-of-school youths, there is a disturbingly consistent lack of program earnings gains across several major studies....

For adults, we still do not know what works best for whom... For out-of-school youths, we are at a more primitive stage in our understanding of how to increase labor market success; we have not found any way to do so...

But it will not help to seek refuge in comfortable fictions. The genuine racism that lingers in white America is not a primary cause of these difficulties, and the view that "nothing has fundamentally changed" on America s racial landscape is insupportable. In their book America in Black and White, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom opine that such a "flat-Earth view of white attitudes" can only be held by those who believe that social science evidence is worthless."

Actually, as even they realize, that is too simple an explanation for overreliance on the rhetorical hammer of "racism." For many African Americans, "racism" is simply an intuitively appealing way to make sense of a complicated and disturbing social and economic milieu. Resort to "racism" (which takes its most extreme form as belief in anti-black conspiracies) is fundamentally symptomatic of a deeply frustrated popular groping for answers to questions triggered, ironically, by the vanquishing of the old racial order and by the failure of rising tides to lift all ships and wash away all problems. Indeed, the burial of Jim Crow was followed by social challenges that scarcely seemed to exist when it was alive. This may help persuade some African Americans that a malicious chicanery must be afoot.

For activists and the intelligentsia, "racism" offers obvious political leverage for claiming the moral high ground and sustaining pressure for social change. Trouble is, there is just enough real racism left to render "racism" both a plausible explanation to the black masses and a convenient advocacy fulcrum for black elites.

African-American leadership may be frustrated, but it is not stupid. Its members doubtless appreciate that the current malaise afflicting poor blacks is largely a concomitant of forces like middle-class residential and educational choices and broader economic developments. (When Jim Crow flourished, it was far more commonly possible for a man with no education beyond the primary grades to feed a family.) One also detects, especially among black clergy, a grim awareness that personal and collective values, not just skill acquisition, are essential to strong communities and enhanced life chances. But the leadership game also dictates that one play with the cards available, and the "race card" can be hard to resist, even when inappropriate. Just ask New York City s indefatigable Al Sharpton.

We need hard and courageous thinking about the complex array of troubles that plague the black community and the nation, but we do not suffer for lack of chatter about race. Any careful empirical study of the attention accorded race in both the electronic and print media would surely find impressive amounts of race-related news, as well as opinion reflecting every conceivable viewpoint. We may not always be completely forthright with one another, but the subject is never very far off any sentient citizen's radar screen. As Donald Horowitz recently remarked, Americans today may be enduring a serious case of "race fatigue."

We do lack both crucial knowledge (about how to produce various positive policy effects) and the political consensus essential to making available dramatically increased resources for ambitious policy initiatives. It is unclear that franker interracial talk, however desirable, will spur much change on either front. If anyone can lead a probing national seminar on race, surely that person is President Clinton. But even he is all too aware that presidents are most likely to spark successful conversations when "success" has a narrow and precise meanin--such as adoption of a Civil Rights Act or a Strategic Defense Initiative.

Affirmative action certainly warrants hard thinking, though enduring disagreement on that front appears inescapable. Our collective attachment to the notion of meritocracy, of individually earned rewards, runs deep. The ideals of colorblindness and racial diversity remain hard to reconcile, at least for the present. As Harvard Law Professor Christopher Edley argues in a recent volume, the subject is far more complex than simple slogans allow. Unfortunately, that is true even of the slogan coined by Edley's former boss, President Clinton: "amend it, don't end it." As a nation we are not going to dispense with affirmative action entirely. Nor do we wish to. Aggressive outreach and job training targeted at African Americans stir controversy mainly by falling short of their announced goals. And corporate America is reasonably content with the status quo, as the Reagan administration quickly discovered.

But some varieties of affirmative action (such as race-normed tests and further breaks for the already conspicuously advantaged) have proved difficult to defend. One specific approach in need of mending is any academic admissions process that displaces deserving white candidates to make room for minorities with weaker credentials who cannot or do not complete the program to which they've been admitted. As an affront to both efficiency and justice, failures of this sort ought to concern conservatives and liberals alike. To the degree that a policy slips toward all cost and no benefit, it would appear perverse by definition. Moreover, the Clinton administration's mantra that "quotas are illegal" may be disingenuous if de facto quotas (which afford the advantage of hard targets to aim for) operate in place of legal ones.

But how common are such defects in the affirmative action universe? More common, one suspects, are efforts that regularly spawn both successes and failures, and where a quota smear won't easily stick. The obvious example of a Colin Powell, who redeems whatever jumpstart he may have enjoyed through distinguished performance, is bound to give even some affirmative action critics a moment's hesitation. That's clearly why President Clinton tried to squeeze Abigail Thernstrom with the Powell example during a televised town hall meeting on race last December.

Possibly the most insidious effect of the affirmative action furor is to shift precious time in the national spotlight away from our low-income black citizens, whose long-term fates merit the hardest thinking of all. Affirmative action, a boon to middle-class blacks like me, promises little help on that front. Nor does the continuing university-based mudwrestle over multiculturalism. The symposium in this issue of the Brookings Review concentrates specifically on what might be called "the black predicament." This represents another conscious editorial choice, grounded in the conviction that the great social question of the new millennium is less likely to be "can we all get along?" than "can we all get ahead?"

      

 

 

To the Editor:

Thanks Heaven for Arnold P. Wendroff, a research associate with the department of geology at Brooklyn College, for calling attention to the potentially grave health consequences of ritual mercury use (news article, Dec. 14). Let us hope that the resulting inquiry determines those consequences to be minimal.

Your article reports that some health officials might fear treading on cultural sensitivities. I suspect that the absence of a convenient institutional villain poses a further constraint. Were a corporation believed responsible for mercury exposure, the public outrage would be deafening. This episode reminds us once again that public health begins at home.

Christopher H. Foreman, Jr., Takoma Park, Md.
Dec. 19, 1997

     

 

 

On February 11, 1994, President Clinton issued an executive order titled "Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority and Low Income Populations." The administration therewith announced that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other federal programs would begin "identifying and addressing, as appropriate, disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects...on minority populations and low-income populations in the United States."

Described thus, "environmental justice" (also called "environmental equity") certainly seems a reasonable concern. After all, minorities and low-income persons suffer disproportionately from many illnesses and often cannot obtain adequate health care. And because lack of money or education can seriously limit residential and employment options, such persons might have more difficulty avoiding polluted localities. Moreover, communities populated largely by minorities or low-income persons might be politically weak and thus more susceptible than affluent neighborhoods to becoming locales for dumps, waste-treatment plants, and other land uses unwanted by residents in the vicinity. And if pollution causes disease, such susceptibility could be very important.

A Movement Is Born

But some troubling misconceptions accompany these plausible arguments. The executive order and related EPA policy innovations stemmed from allegations by the "environmental justice" (EJ) movement of institutionalized "environmental racism."

The EJ movement is a diverse coalition of "people of color" grassroots organizations and their allies. EJ activism, like most other forms of grassroots environmentalism, differs somewhat from traditional—"hiking, biking, and spotted owls"—environmentalism. Escalating public concern about toxic pollutants (especially hazardous waste) in the wake of the Love Canal scare of 1980, and the costly congressional overreaction to that scare (Superfund), heightened the visibility and credibility of appeals based on purported environmental hazards in minority communities.

Suddenly, environmentalism wasn't just a "middle-class white folks" issue. The EJ movement made its first splash in 1982, with a protest against a proposed landfill for PCB-contaminated soil in Warren County, North Carolina. Hundreds of demonstrators were arrested in the failed endeavor to prevent the landfill. District of Columbia Congressional delegate Walter Fauntroy returned from Warren County to spur the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), an investigative arm of Congress, to pursue an inquiry.

Shallow Evidence

The GAO found that predominately Black communities were the sites of three of the four "offsite" (i.e., not adjacent to or part of an industrial facility) hazardous-waste landfills in a region comprising eight southeastern states. That the GAO could not address whether these landfills would affect the health of the populations living near them did not deter the activists from using the GAO's findings as evidence of significant pollution-burden disparities between races and between income groups.

In 1987, a few years after the release of the GAO report, the United Church of Christ (UCC)'s Commis-sion for Racial Justice unveiled Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites—a classic of advocacy research (research influenced by outcome preference and a policy agenda)—at the National Press Club, in Washington, DC. The UCC report—which had not undergone prepublication peer review—suggested a correlation between race and the likelihood of living near either a commercial hazardous-waste facility or an "uncontrolled" toxic-waste site: "Residential ZIP code areas with the highest number of commercial hazardous waste facilities also had the highest mean percentage" of minority residents. According to the report, minorities averaged 24 percent of the total population in ZIP Code (postal-delivery) areas with a commercial hazardous-waste facility, but in ZIP Code areas without such a facility minorities averaged only 12 percent.

But the UCC report also stated, in passing, that more than half the population of the United States lived in ZIP Code areas with a commercial hazardous-waste facility. In any case, such facilities process only a small fraction (perhaps 4 percent) of all hazardous waste in the United States. The UCC report did not provide a comprehensive picture of the distribution of hazardous waste in the U.S., much less evidence of social disparity in that distribution. Moreover, the report did not provide any information on exposure, much less on the possible health consequences thereof.

The UCC report also suggested that minorities were disproportionately endangered by "uncontrolled" toxic-waste sites—i.e., any site specified in the EPA's Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liabilities Information System (CERCLIS)—stating that "three out of every five Black and Hispanic Americans" lived in communities with such sites. But since the 1987 release of the UCC report, the EPA has pronounced 27,000 of what originally were 40,000 "uncontrolled" toxic-waste sites clean or of little or no risk.

The cry of "environmental racism," buoyed by misleading research, is belied by more careful studies. For example, researchers at the University of Massachusetts based their study not on ZIP Code areas, but on census tracts. Census tracts are both smaller and more definable as neighborhoods than ZIP Code areas. The researchers found that commercial hazardous-waste facilities "are no more likely to be located in tracts with higher percentages of blacks and Hispanics than in other tracts."

In 1992 several partisan EJ papers were published as a group in The National Law Journal without prepublication peer review. The articles purported to show racial discrimination in the environmental enforcement process, claiming: (a) that hazardous-waste sites in nonminority communities became members of the National Priorities List of Superfund sites more quickly than did those in minority communities, and (b) that penalties imposed for violations of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act were lighter in minority communities.

But this study had "serious statistical methodological problems," according to Bernard R. Siskin, Ph.D., a statistician retained by the EPA. These problems included the presentation of statistically insignificant findings. Dr. Siskin ascribed the aforementioned time-lag claim to a "failure . . . to account for the correct date on which the site is first discovered."

Even the GAO, whose 1983 report had provided EJ partisans with ammunition, concluded in a much more elaborate (and widely ignored) 1995 study: "The percentage of minorities and low-income people living within one mile of nonhazardous municipal landfills was more often lower than the percentage in the rest of the country. When the data from our sample were used to make estimates about all nonhazardous municipal landfills in the nation, neither minorities nor low-income people were overrepresented in any consistent manner."

Color Them Egalitarian

Unsettling as the attachment of EJ activists to dubious empirical findings may be, such attachment is not the movement's only serious shortcoming. Another serious, but more subtle, defect is its very nature as a diverse coalition of grassroots groups seeking "redress" of an unlimited number of grievances. For example, Native American activists are often spurred by tribal-culture and sovereignty concerns, while others focus on occupational exposure to chemicals among migrant farmworkers. All such constituencies have been encouraged to vent their claims to the EPA's Office of Environmental Justice (OEJ) and to the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC), the activist-dominated federal advisory committee with which the OEJ closely collaborates.

This diverse "people of color" coalition could not be maintained without faith in the illusion that priorities and tradeoffs are unnecessary. In the world of EJ activism (as in grassroots environmentalism generally), all environmental concerns—childhood lead poisoning, global climate change, nuclear waste, pesticide use, Superfund sites, urban air pollution, and so forth—have equal rank. Of course, prioritization of these concerns would result in neglect of some of them and contention among members of the coalition.

Prioritization of environmental issues is at variance with what makes the EJ movement tick: egalitarianism. In the realm of such activism, the downgrading of any concern amounts to something intolerable to many activists: victimization. The only priority shared by grassroots activists of all ethnicities is citizen involvement. It seems never to have occurred to many activists that the attention they demand for minor, unsubstantiated, or nonexistent problems might distract attention from serious real-life problems, such as lead exposure among urban minority children.

In the final analysis, EJ activism is not a public health movement but a loose aggregation of advocates for grassroots democracy and social justice—including, at an extreme, some who oppose industrial capitalism. Its major political aims include unifying residents and increasing their collective profiles in policy debates and governmental decision-making. Its ultimate aim is to reallocate society's resources. Because of these aims, the movement can ill afford pursuing a health-centered agenda; alleged health hazards that do not readily outrage the public have little utility in mobilizing citizens. Personal danger due to personal behavior—such as smoking—tends not to outrage the public and thus lacks such utility. More useful for mobilization purposes are alleged hazards perceivable as having been imposed on communities by corporations (especially those considered intrusive) or by governmental entities that appear distant, unaccountable, or racist.

An understanding of the fundamental ideals of the EJ movement (and of grassroots environmentalism overall)—democratization and wealth redistribution—facilitates comprehension of the activists' persistent emphasis on such minor or weakly documented hazards as dioxin, environmental "hormone disrupters," or most toxic-waste sites. These ideals also account for the movement's acceptance of intuition as a means of perceiving risk. This is exemplified by the longevity of the thoroughly debunked folklore that the concentration of petrochemical facilities in Louisiana created a "cancer alley."

On the other hand, because smoking is both voluntary and common, tobacco use is not an EJ issue. The approximately 47,000 annual tobacco-related deaths in the African-American community elicit little outrage among EJ activists, partly because these deaths are perceived as proportionate. Even the remarkably high smoking rates among low-income and Native-American citizens provoke little activist concern.

Urban Tobacco Roads

In a change of pace, minority activists tackled a worthy issue in 1990 when R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company proposed to pitch "Uptown," a then-forthcoming cigarette brand, to the African-American market. This issue had all the elements most useful for mobilizing a community: A distinct, formidable, outside entity explicitly announced that it would target an ethnic group for the marketing of a new and tangible source of harm. Once Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis Sullivan, an African-American, publicly denounced R.J. Reynolds for fostering a "culture of cancer" in the Black community, the company canceled test-marketing of "Uptown."

If only corporations would propose to burn tobacco in urban incinerators, or to bury it in minority-neighborhood landfills. Now that would be an environmental justice issue!

     

 

 

For several years grassroots activists have argued that "environmental racism" too often characterizes the way society allocates pollution and hazardous chemical exposures. In the years since Love Canal a multi-ethnic (black, Latino, Native American, and Asian American) movement for "environmental justice" has coalesced around the belief that low income and minority communities have too often either been turned into dumping grounds—targets for toxic landfills, incinerators, and various dirty industries—or been quietly victimized by lax environmental enforcement.

The environmental justice movement has won significant local and national victories, blocking outright or negotiating changes in, numerous planned facilities. In a major 1994 political breakthrough for the movement, President Clinton signed an executive order instructing the federal government, not just the Environmental Protection Agency, to start "identifying and addressing, as appropriate, disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects" among low income and minority populations.

Taking the executive order to heart, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board last May rebuffed an application to build a uranium enrichment plant between two African American neighborhoods in Louisiana. The board relied heavily on scholar-activist Robert Bullard's testimony that the site selection process did not adequately assess relevant environmental, social and economic impacts. In September EPA held up the permit for a vinyl chloride plant in Convent, Louisiana on similar grounds. EPA is now casting about for ways to show commitment to environmental justice, especially by bringing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act (which bars discrimination by recipients of federal funds) more forcefully into play.

On the judicial front, the black residents of the Kennedy Heights neighborhood in Houston are in federal court seeking as much as $500 million in damages, alleging that cancer, lupus, and other adverse effects can be traced to crude oil residues that contaminated first the soil on which their homes were built and thereafter their drinking water. The defendant, the Chevron Corporation, denies any unusual pattern of illness in Kennedy Heights, and claims that the company has done nothing injurious. A victory by the residents would mark the first favorable court ruling on a claim of environmental racism. "Race has been injected into this case as a litigation strategy," asserts Chevron's lawyer Robert E. Meadows. "I think it's wrong."

This playing of the environmental race card is, to say the least, a major public health distraction for minorities. And we will surely see much more of it, especially if the Kennedy Heights residents win their lawsuit.

Epidemiologists and toxicologists have found the concept of a disease "cluster" extremely useful for unraveling infectious diseases (like AIDS), occupational illnesses (like cancer among vinyl chloride workers), and effects linked to isolated products (such as bacteria-tainted hamburger and experimental drugs). But as both the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Public Health Association point out, attempts to link apparent clusters of noninfectious disease to general environmental factors outside workplaces (where exposures can be strikingly high) rarely succeed. In large populations, clusters can appear randomly or because of the way cases are counted. Sometimes the number of verifiable cases of a condition is simply too small to permit confident causal inference.

It seems never to occur to activists that any significant public health price must be paid for cranking up citizen outrage against weakly documented (and possibly ephemeral) hazards. But time and money spent chasing chemical chimeras will be unavailable to expend against well-established causes of preventable and treatable disease.

Many such health conditions disproportionately affect minorities and the poor: AIDS, asthma, obesity (especially among African American women), hypertension, diabetes, and so on. Popular attention to these things, and to a short list of significant environmental hazards faced disproportionately by the black poor (such as residential lead paint), is now threatened by a national environmental justice agenda so utterly shapeless as to embrace almost any environment-related grievance or aspiration espoused by any claimant of color. I've attended many meetings devoted to environmental justice, and heard a fair amount about the possible hazards of environmental "endocrine disrupters." I've never heard tobacco mentioned once.

This problem of skewed or missing priorities will only worsen should the residents of Kennedy Heights win their lawsuit. The biggest winner by far would be John O'Quinn, the prosperous Texas attorney who aims to do for Kennedy Heights what he has already done for his clients in silicone breast implant litigation. If he can make Chevron pay, trial lawyers across the country will begin trolling for "poisoned" minority neighborhoods to represent. And communities of color will thus have yet another powerful distraction taking their eyes off the real prize of public health.

     

 

 

Since Love Canal, grassroots activists and their allies in academia have argued that "environmental racism" too often characterizes the way society allocates pollution, hazardous chemical exposures, and environmental law enforcement. A multi-ethnic (black, Latino, Native American, and Asian American) movement for "environmental justice" (EJ) has spurred the creation of an Office of Environmental Justice at EPA. It has also inspired EPA Administrator Carole Browner to create a National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) through which activists, industry representatives, and the agency could "brainstorm" for ways to reach out to minority and low-income communities and regularly hear their pleas for environmental redress.

In the name of environmental reform, however, inner-city activists have been pushing their own agenda. Indeed, the best way to think of EJ partisans is as social justice activists who choose to pursue their goals within an institutional and rhetorical framework of environmentalism.

The EJ movement's biggest coup was the February 1994 presidential executive order instructing federal programs across the board to address "disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects. . .on minority populations and low-income populations in the United States." Health is surely a concern of EJ activism. The specter of poisoned communities is obviously compelling for constituencies that have generally paid scant attention to (and sometimes even disdained) the "hiking, biking, and spotted owls" brand of white middle-class environmentalism.

But "health" is really only the tip of the EJ iceberg. Below the water line lurks a far broader social justice agenda. Consider the very names of some of the major activist organizations.

NEJAC chairman Richard Moore heads the Albuquerque-based Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice. There is also the Environmental Justice Project of the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice, located in Atlanta and run by the indefatigable Connie Tucker, a self-declared "Pan-Africanist."

When the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit convened in Washington, D.C. in October 1991, the 17 "principles of environmental justice" it adopted demanded an end to "the production of all toxins, hazardous wastes, and radioactive materials" and to the "testing of experimental reproductive and medical procedures and vaccinations on people of color." The principles also affirmed the right of everyone to safe and healthy work environments, to quality health care, and to freedom from the need to choose between unsafe jobs and unemployment. The preamble, modeled on the U.S. Constitution, pronounced the aims of the meeting as including nothing less than "our political, economic and cultural liberation that has been denied for over 500 years of colonization and oppression, resulting in the poisoning of our communities and land and the genocide of our people. . ." Clearly, more than mere environmentalism is operating here.

In March 1993 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Pat Bryant, head of the Gulf Coast Tenants Association, another EJ group, offered a similarly lengthy list of grievances. And this past August, during a segment of MSNBC's "Internight" television program, the Reverend Jesse Jackson couched his support for a lawsuit by residents of a black Houston neighborhood against the Chevron Corporation in stark social justice terms. The resident of Kennedy Heights allege that Chevron's predecessor, the Gulf Oil Corporation, targeted contaminated land for a black housing development, and they are seeking up to $500 million in damages.

During the program Jackson argued that Chevron needs to "come to the table" to discuss jobs and the company's broader obligations to the neighborhood. Jackson made this point in response to my argument that modern epidemiology generally offers little support for citizen allegations of environmentally-induced clusters of non-infectious chronic disease. I was trying to talk science but Jackson had his eyes on a different prize altogether.

A primary appeal of the EJ rubric clearly lies in the leverage it might offer over redistributive and political objectives that have little, if anything, to do with industrial pollution. In the final analysis, the EJ movement is not primarily a "public health" movement but a loose aggregation of advocates for grassroots democracy, institutional accountability, and social justice. As with grassroots environmentalism generally, its fringes include a fair number of folks whose underlying thrust is a frank dislike of industrial capitalism.

EJ aspires to unify residents, to increase their collective profiles in policy debates and decision making, and to get "the system" (i.e. firms and government) to yield as many environment-related social benefits as possible. This egalitarian motivation means that EJ can ill afford an agenda driven mainly by health impacts. Mortality and morbidity associated with causes that don't easily prompt the necessary citizen outrage—tobacco-use or poor dietary habits are obvious examples—make for difficult mobilizing.

The movement's aims also explain its insistent emphasis (as with grassroots environmentalism generally) on relatively minor or weakly-documented (but nonetheless fear-inducing) hazards like dioxin, toxic waste sites, and environmental "endocrine disrupters." The debunked folk myth of a "cancer alley in Louisiana lives on in the minds of EJ activists because it is both intuitively appealing and politically useful.

This is not to argue that environmental poisons are innocuous. They are not. But we cannot rely on EJ activists to give communities balanced guidance on the relative significance of various environmental risks. For the activists, a claim about risk is a political tool in the service of broader purposes.

Nevertheless, there are signs that EJ activists and the political establishment might be able to cooperate on a social justice agenda that avoids distorting public health priorities in minority communities. The administration's "brownfields" urban revitalization initiative is the vehicle. By reducing disincentive barriers to local development unwittingly erected by Superfund's liability scheme, the Clinton EPA hopes to spur jobs, training, and life chances among communities of all colors throughout the country.

Activists were at first suspicious when the administration began talking up brownfields redevelopment in 1994, fearing it might be just an excuse to introduce polluting development. But with aggressive outreach by EPA, activists are coming around, and brownfields is now a major item on NEJAC's agenda.

By shedding its misleading health rhetoric, and by moving overtly toward the economic agenda that has actually propelled it all along, EJ may yet play a productive role in national public policy debate.

     

 

 

During its halcyon legislative days in the 1970s, the public face of environmentalism was overwhelmingly white and middle class. Minority politicians provided reliable votes for environmental statutes but were often acutely suspicious of mainstream environmentalism, believing the urban poor a more endangered species than spotted owls. Whitney Young, executive director of the National Urban League, bluntly advised postponing the war on pollution until "after the war on poverty is won."

Today, however, a national environmental justice movement dominated by people of color is aggressively demanding attention to pollutionþand to race, poverty, and apparent links between them. Sustained by a combination of research findings and widespread outrage among communities in toxic terror, the movement claims that a lack of power among poor and minority communities has saddled them with disproportionate burdens both in pollution and in environmental policy implementation.

In fits and starts, state governments are beginning to grapple with the issue. So is the Clinton administration, which in February 1994 issued executive order 12898 charging each cabinet department to "make achieving environmental justice part of its mission," with the Environmental Protection Agency to lead the way. Having inherited an office of environmental equity from the Bush administration, EPA administrator Carol Browner renamed it the office of environmental justice, appointed a national environmental justice advisory council stocked heavily with advocates, and promoted strategic planning. Under assistant administrator Elliott P. Laws, EPA's office of solid waste and emergency response (OSWER) has made environmental justice a top priority.

All this—the energizing of the movement, the community activism, the state and federal response—sounds promising and is certainly well-intended. But the environmentally just society is not just around the corner. Many hurdles lie between the status quo and a thoughtfully reformed regime of environmental policy, one that confers significant additional benefits on traditionally disadvantaged groups.

The Movement Problem

Ironically, one problem is the movement itself. An artfully nurtured "big tent" embracing black, Latino, Asian, and Native American grassroots organizations and their allies, the environmental justice movement began in earnest with a now legendary 1982 Warren County, North Carolina, protest against a proposed PCB landfill. Demonstrations failed to stop the landfill, but hundreds of protesters were arrested. A subsequent study of hazardous waste landfills in the southeast by the General Accounting Office found that blacks were a majority of the population in three of the four 'off-site" (that is, not associated with an industrial facility) landfills in the region. As time went on, other communities, in tandem with scholar- activists like sociologist Robert Bullard, would coalesce into a movement challenging what they saw as an unmistakable and insidious tendency to make communities of color society's dumping ground.

The problem the movement faces is crucial, and probably unavoidable. The movement has grown, and maintained internal harmony, through a blend of inclusiveness and ideological appeals that derails discussion of priorities and trade- offs. It tends therefore to avoid difficult but necessary decisions. For example, the notion of acceptable risk, basic to any realistic approach to health and safety, is suspect within the movement as an excuse for victimizing people of color. A "bottom-up" coalition for which all grievances are created equal is especially hard pressed to think in terms of the relative risks and costs of such environmental hazards as childhood lead and farm worker pesticide exposures, Superfund cleanups, incinerator sitings, or even non-environmental health hazards. The movement presumes that any person of color voicing any environmental-related anxiety or aspiration represents a genuine environmental justice problem. Indeed, a broader redistributive and cultural agenda, as well as a profound discomfort with industrial capitalism generally, lurks just behind the concerns over unequal pollution impacts. To some extent this isnþt really surprising. The same ethnic and neighborhood empowerment yearnings visible in "community action" a generation ago have remained with us all along, to resurface with an environmental spin.

Causal Problems

Through a blend of skillful grassroots mobilization, advocacy research, and well- crafted rhetoric, the environmental justice movement has placed its concerns on the national policy agenda. Although the full universe of empirical studies offers mixed support for the movement's claim of racial disparities in the distribution of pollution, a 1994 National Wildlife Federation review of 64 highly diverse studies concluded that all but one "found environmental disparities either by race or income, regardless of the kind of environmental concern or the level of geographic specificity examined." In 1987 the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice, headed by Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr., released its report on Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, finding that "communities with the greatest number of commercial hazardous waste facilities had the highest composition of racial and ethnic residents."

But advocacy and research have not put to rest some tricky causal issues. If people of color indeed bear disproportionate environmental burdens, what role has government policy played in creating this state of affairs? What concrete health impacts follow from such burdens? And what ameliorative role can government policy plausibly play?

One complication lies in how one defines a burden. Proximity to an existing or potential site or facility may stimulate grassroots outrage but by itself says little about the degree of actual exposure or hazard posed. Because of variables such as groundwater dynamics and the quality of site construction or facility management, not all sites or facilities are equally dangerous. Experts agree that many of the 35,000 locations on EPA's inventory of hazardous waste sites probably pose little risk.

Besides being unhelpful regarding the distribution of actual risk, the Commission for Racial Justice study is also unreliable as a guide to the distribution of the waste itself. By conning its focus to off-site hazardous waste facilities, it overlooks the vast majority (up to 96 percent) of hazardous waste processed on- site by the entity that generates it.

A 1994 update of the commission study touches on another problem. The proximity of people of color to commercial hazardous waste facilities (or, for that matter, any other kind of noxious site) may be due to forces over which government, particularly the federal government, has little influence. The update notes that "between 1980 and 1993, the concentration of people of color living in zip codes with commercial hazardous waste facilities increased from 25 percent to almost 31 percent of the average population around the facilities." The study offers several possible explanations, "including the migration, birth, or death of individuals, and the relocation, start-up, or closure of toxic waste facilities." To the extent that poor people reproduce more rapidly than wealthier ones or that low land values attract both poor people and industrial facilities, as is clearly the case, federal policy will be hard pressed to address the resulting inequities. It is particularly telling that this apparent increase has taken place in the post-Love Canal era, as all communities, including those of color, became both more willing and more able to block proposed facilities.

The health risks posed by environmental toxins are freighted with as much uncertainty as any public policy problem we face. On some matters (asbestos, say) we arguably have both abundant knowledge and something approaching expert consensus. On others our understanding is extremely limited and will probably never be definitive. EPA officials and environmental justice advocates often speak about grappling with the "multiple, cumulative, and synergistic risks" especially relevant to communities of color facing a variety of potential environmental and other health stresses at once and over time. For purposes of practical (and highly politicized) policy making on a community-by-community basis, though, the kind of knowledge envisioned may well amount to little more than a pot of gold at the end of the analytic rainbow. The reasons are obvious: a plethora of variables, insufficient command of their causal interrelationships, and mistrust of experts, especially should they produce findings that are either unsupportive of strongly held beliefs or riddled with ambiguity. Like the mainstream environmentalism it has often criticized as insensitive to minority perspectives, the environmental justice movement has little use for the skepticism about alleged health risks that a growing literature argues is sometimes warranted.

Environmental justice advocates assert, plausibly enough, that poor and minority areas are a magnet for environmental hazards in part because wealthier and whiter ones that are better able to defend their interests can shun them. But whatever may have been true in the past, these days minorities and whites alike often effectively marshal local outrage to play the "Not In My Backyard" (NIMBY) game. And the environmental racism argument, unlike critiques of conventional racial discrimination, posits disproportionate impact on minorities rather than a burden borne solely by them. Often a "minority area" is simply one with a "greater than average" percentage of minority residents. Since toxic air emissions, pesticide runoffs, and groundwater contamination cannot neatly select their victims by race or income, the inequities visited upon minorities affect a great many others as well. Indeed, the range of arguably significant environmental equity comparisons is so broad that some doubtless cut the other way: many Native Americans, for example, breathe cleaner air than urban Yuppies and live further from hazardous waste than New Jerseys white ethnics.

Themes of Justice

If science cannot lead us to the promised land, then perhaps politics and administration can at least get us part way there. After all, the environmental justice movement is less about the veritable health cards being dealt than about strong suspicions of a stacked deck.

Like the movement that inspired it, the Clinton administration's executive order casts the broadest possible net, essentially instructing the executive branch to look hard for ways to identify and respond to any minority concerns and interests that are arguably environment-related. Such concerns and interests extend far beyond the allegations of siting inequity that were crucial to getting White House and media attention. Two years after the order's promulgation, the basic outline of the government's implementation effort has emerged. Apparent in planning efforts throughout the government, it embraces ve overlapping themes: participation, information, development, enforcement, and prevention. This mix reflects demands for local empowerment, the plethora of programs at which they are directed, and the menu of responses available (especially without new money or legislation). The movements bottom-up demands have yielded an analogous (albeit tentative and mostly low-prole) hodgepodge of agency-level process innovations.

A broad combination of outreach to, participation by, and information for communities of color forms the core of federal environmental justice empowerment efforts today. In theory at least, every department and large agency offers advisory panels and rulemaking or allocative processes that might be made more permeable to the voices and interests of disadvantaged minorities. EPA's OSWER is pushing community advisory groups to "promote early, direct, and meaningful public involvement in the Superfund cleanup process." Defense has advisory boards to expand community involvement in cleanup decisions at military bases. Health and Human Services offers funding for environmental risk communication and education in minority communities.

On the development front, OSWER is pursuing an ambitious initiative on urban "brownelds," contaminated property often shunned by developers, banks, and insurers at least partly because of environmental concerns. Last July OSWER announced 15 cities that would each receive $200,000 in seed money to help nurture the return of brownelds to productive uses. OSWER's efforts dovetail with Housing and Urban Development's empowerment zones and enterprise communities program for directing community development funds to distressed areas.

There is also now tough talk from EPA about making enforcement more equitable. Current Supreme Court equal protection doctrine holds that plaintiff's must prove intentional discrimination, but intent is often impossible to demonstrate successfully. As a potential avenue of redress for communities of color, EPA and the Department of Justice are showing considerable interest in Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which provides that "No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance." As Washington University Law Professor Richard Lazarus notes, "The principal advantage of Title VI over equal protection is that courts have not required a showing of discriminatory intent. . . . Disparate impact has been enough." By last summer EPA was reviewing some two dozen petitions for redress under Title VI.

Pollution prevention is perhaps where environmental justice advocates find the easiest common ground with traditional environmentalists. Both see "green" technologies as a crucial weapon since preventing pollution obviates the need for distributing it equitably. And environmentalists have often viewed grassroots NIMBY activity that constrains treatment, storage, and disposal capacity as a weapon in the long-term war to force prevention. For these reasons, and because of significant successes in source reduction, it has been easy to recast ongoing prevention efforts as serving the cause of environmental justice.

Blunt and Fragile Instruments

To the extent that risk abatement and health improvements remain major environmental justice goals, emerging policies will prove blunt, or even irrelevant, instruments for their achievement. Brownelds redevelopment has little immediately to do with health. The director of environmental quality for the National Association of Manufacturers notes gamely that economic development will help improve health, because "the worst thing healthwise is to be poor." But the brownelds sites themselves pose mostly minor health threats. Indeed, EPA's ability to make the brownelds program work hinges on the relatively mild contamination at many sites and the relative ease with which the agency can lower, or at least clarify, future liability.

And while participation and outreach address the need for locally acceptable policies, they do not automatically assure that the most serious community health risks are given highest priority. What they may actually assure in some instances is that the loudest voices, the shrewdest or most diligent organizers, and the most obvious targets of local outrage will be elevated.

Nor is it by any means clear that environmental risks are always the most serious health risks that communities of color face. Hypertension, obesity, low birthweights, inadequate prenatal care, substance abuse, and violence are only some of the forces that arguably deserve pride of place in the struggle to improve the lives and health of communities of color. That such forces are more intractable and harder to mobilize around than a Superfund site or a proposed landfill must not deter communities from asking (and being vigorously encouraged by government policy makers and others to ask) hard questions about overall health priorities.

Federal environmental justice policy also remains extremely fragile in Washington. Even when Democrats controlled Congress during the first two years of the Clinton administration, environmental justice made little headway on Capitol Hill. In fashioning its largely doomed environmental agenda for the Democratic- controlled 103rd Congress, the administration left aside a tough bill proposed earlier by then Senator Al Gore. Gore's bill ordered EPA to scrutinize human health in the 100 counties containing the highest total weight of toxic chemicals and, if adverse health effects were found, to impose a moratorium on future siting that compounded the problem. Analytic difficulties aside, such hard-edged federal restrictions were too politically explosive even among congressional Democrats, and the Clinton administration opted for a non-legislative approach to environmental justice.

The Republicans who control Capitol Hill today rally around environmental justice of a different sort. In the conservative lexicon, environmental injustice means excessive regulatory encroachment on private property rights. Even thriving EPA programs can never bear the full weight of the redistributive expectations of the environmental justice advocates, but in the current climate of attacks on EPA's resources and authority, the vision of environmental justice favored by environmentalists and the grassroots Left faces a dire predicament indeed. Reassurances to the contrary notwithstanding, it will be hard for agency leaders to pay much sustained attention to environmental justice when they have more fundamental battles to fight.

An obvious confluence of business and community interests suggests that brownelds redevelopment could remain the high-prole pillar of federal environmental justice policy over the long run. Enterprise-minded conservatives, in alliance with Democrats anxious to help cities, might be able to rally behind it, especially if crafted to minimize its pork-barrel aspects (or, alternatively, to make the pork so tasty as to be irresistible to both parties). But no one familiar with the array of pitfalls that can bedevil the implementation of complex, well-intended policies should be shocked if, a decade or two hence, the very mention of "environmental justice" evokes a wince, a sigh, or a quiet shake of the head.